Day 2535, selling air.

Day's pictures

Friedrich Nietzsche

The gay science
Book one

17 Finding a motive for one ‘s poverty. – There is clearly no trick that enables us to turn a poor virtue into a rich and overflowing one, but we can surely reinterpret its poverty nicely into a necessity, so that its sight no longer offends us and we no longer make reproachful faces at fate on its account. That is what the wise gardener does when he places the poor little stream in his garden in the arms of a nymph and thus finds a motive for its poverty: and who wouldn’t need nymphs as he does?

Day 2477, at work

Day's pictures, Video

This is a window I work on now. It is from a church built in 1936 that got partially burned down 2 years ago. They will replace most of the old windows with new, better isolated ones, but my task is to preserve 3 of the original windows. In the two little videos below, you can see how I put in the glass panes, something I learned not so long ago when I started working here. It is satisfying work to preserve something that was almost given up.  

Day 2381, gangsta’s paradise.

Day's pictures

I still remember when I bought this Coolio cd. It was 1994, and I lived in Curacao, one of the former Dutch Caribbean Islands. I didn’t listen much to radio back then, but I often went to one of the few record stores and just browsed through de cd’s and picked the ones that spoke to me to listen to in the store, that way, I had a nice couple of hours of listening to unknown music and with some luck some new music to take home for keeps.

I never had a specific taste for rap music, but I started listening to Ice-T and Ice Cube around that same time because of the seriousness of their lyrics and what they tried to tell. They sometimes fooled around also, but this Coolio cd was for sure more lighthearted. I still listen to it every now and then, that’s why I keep my cd player around and all the CDs I ever bought, I am a sentimental guy, and these  old CDs bring me back to those day’s like little time machines in a box. 

I have not followed his career or life, but I hope he had a good life and a peaceful way of leaving us all…

The number you can listen to and read the lyrics from is his most famous song “Gangsta’s paradise, it has some good lyrics, and as a part-time philosopher, I can pick and appreciate some lines that are, for me, timeless in the describing the world we still live in.